Custom shapes for the solder mask blocker

this is actually a nice feature to have one day

In my case with the pancake coil part this could enable me to make a gap-line across the coil so that i could short out coil windings to tinker with the inductance, this would introduce other side effects but i can see practical use for this.

On the SVG / XML side of things how is the soldermask layer named? something like soldermaks0 and soldermask1? for bottom and top? I have not come across these names yet so for all i know they don’t even exist.

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Heya,

Has anyone found a workaround or trick to making this happen? I just need two empty circles
to allow LEDs to shine through my boards from the underside. This would basically make my project complete.

Thanks,
Eric

Won’t a hole (from core parts bin pcb view) do what you need? This will put a hole with no pad through the board which I expect you would need to get the light through the fibreglass …

No since we are talking about only removing solder mask not creating a hole. I’m looking for an LED to shine through the actual fiberglass which looks really beautiful.

There is a way… What size do you want the circle?

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Rad! I would love it to be 12mm if possible.

I will make it tomorrow for you. Both sides solder mask keepout… correct?

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I went ahead and made it, only took a couple of minutes… :relaxed:
Solder-Mask-Keepout_12mm.fzpz (2.1 KB)

I put a silkscreen around it so you can see where it is at, otherwise it would be invisible. You can remove the silkscreen by right click, Hide part silkscreen. It checks out on OSH Park gerber test…

Please let me know how it works when the boards come back… Post a picture…

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Whoa thank you!! So how where you able to accomplish that? I really appreciate that.

Magic… :astonished:

What type of magic did you go with?

Wizard magic… :hushed:

XTML type Wizard magic or SVG?

SVG Wizard magic with invisibility copper… :smirk:

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Ok awesome :slight_smile: Is there also a feature that allows you to leave solder mask off one entire side of a PCB? My PCB is 228mm x 139mm. Kinda big.

So you inherited my magical wizardry powers…

Try this one, invisibility copper 240mm 150mm, one side. You can use it over the whole board or just part of a board. The invisibility copper also blocks out silkscreen that same as copper does. There is no way around that… Solder Mask Keepout_240x150.fzpz (2.0 KB)

I think owe me a couple of :heart: (like this post)…

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Very nice, thank you <3

So I tried out both and the smaller circles you sent before block the mask perfectly on both sides when I use a gerber viewer. But the 240mm x 150mm blocker doesn’t show (aka mask still shows up). Any ideas?

That is interesting… The right side of the blocker need to be touching the board. When I tested it out, I covered up left half of the PCB, assuming it would work if you covered up all of the board (like the blocker does). You can cover up the whole board as long as the right side (right line) of the solder mask keepout is on the board. Try it with right side on the right edge of the PCB and see what happens.

Don’t know why it works that why… May be the way Fritzing works. I will test it with a real copper pad and see if it does the same thing.

Thanks for the likes…

Yep, it does exactly the same thing with a real copper pad… So it is a Fritzing thing…

That’s so weird I was just wondering about trying just that. Will let you know if it works!